Part 2: Optimization Strategies & Tips for the Holiday Season

Last week we shared a few strategies for your holiday campaigns and this week we wanted to give you a few optimization tips that you can implement today with your individual holiday strategies.

Regardless of your goals, here are three tips about optimizing your Grants account for the holiday season.

Clean Up Keywords

Your New Year’s resolution doesn’t have to wait until January. As you look back at the year, don’t forget to check in on your keywords and eliminate what’s not working. Then you can also focus on what’s working best.

One of the first steps in keyword optimization is to clean up keywords. To remove keywords, I recommend checking out keywords with a low clickthrough rate (CTR) but a high cost. These keywords usually decrease your overall performance. Then try pausing any keywords with a CTR of less than 1.0%, since these keywords are only bringing a few clicks.

Review Keywords to Maximize Traffic

The holiday season is a good time to highlight specials and to drive additional traffic that is online during these months. Review your current keywords and think of additional terms. This will enable your ads to reach as much qualified traffic as possible.

Just like when you paused keywords, you may use CTR as an indicator of a high-performing keyword. Look for keywords that have CTRs above than 1%; this is a great starting point for expansion. Then you may want to use the Keyword Tool to find related keywords to add to an ad group.

Another option is to add other relevant keywords with a holiday focus. Since many people are looking to make holiday donations during this time of year, you may want to add donation-specific keywords that still relate to your organization.

Ad Text

To improve your ad’s performance, try to make each one as relevant to your keyword list as possible. Think about how this time of year relates to your marketing. If an aspect of your org receives increased attention around the holiday season, try to find a way to touch on that in your ad text. This can help drive more traffic to your site as well as get your message across to users who come across your ad.

These tips are great for this time of year, but you can continue to use them in every season. Cleaning up keywords, adding new ones, and revising your ad text help maintain your account’s high-performance.

Posted by Taylor, AdWords Team